Daily Wire Backstage dissects Barbiegate as a feminist backlash, exposing Barbie’s subversive matriarchy themes—where Ken’s emasculation and Barbie’s gynecologist visit mock gender equality—while linking Hollywood’s gender ideology to trans activism. Meanwhile, the panel warns Biden’s 2024 collapse hinges on Hunter’s Burisma texts and GARM’s tech censorship, where Facebook allegedly suppressed lab-leak memes at DOJ behest, violating First Amendment rights. Trump’s indictments may backfire, but his base loyalty remains unshaken, while DeSantis’ attacks on him risk alienating voters. The episode frames media suppression as a coordinated assault on free speech, urging alternatives like Daily Wire Plus to bypass censored platforms. [Automatically generated summary]
You are about to listen to the best show at the Daily Wire, not named the Andrew Clavin Show, and that's Daily Wire Backstage.
Myself, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, sit down to discuss politics, religion, the culture, basically everything you've ever wanted to hear about on a show.
Take a listen.
Fake laugh in three, two, one.
Welcome to Daily Wire Backstage.
Tonight, I am not Jeremy Boring.
I'm Michael Knowles.
I'm joined by Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Andrew Clavin.
This show is brought to you by Preborn.
Pre-Born Network Clinics rescues 200 babies' lives every single day.
Donate now at preborn.com slash backstage or dial pound250 and say the keyword baby.
We've got a lot.
Mando, we have a lot to talk about tonight.
We've got, obviously, got to talk about Barbie, the most important issue.
We've got to talk about Hunter Biden.
We've got to talk about 2024.
We've got a big member block.
Don't forget all of this is because of you.
So if you're just one of those Hoi Polloy out there on YouTube, come on, man.
Go on over to dailywire.com, subscribe.
You can still do it.
Become a member.
And then we will chat with you in the member block after the public part of the show.
Then we can get into all the really juicy stuff.
We have some breaking news right now.
The breaking news, of course, is that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
The man has not bitten the dog.
It's Groundhog Day again.
And Donald Trump has been indicted a few more times, I guess, for something.
I don't know.
He may put too much mayonnaise on his sandwich.
He's indicted for that.
Literally, literally.
Has anybody read the latest indictment?
This just happened.
Mr. Shapiro, what is it this time?
So this is the January 6th indictment, the long-awaited January 6th indictment.
They're charging him on four counts.
These are real stretches.
I mean, just on the legal basis, these are very, very large legal stretches.
They're charging him on a conspiracy to defraud the government.
Typically, that means financially defrauding the government.
Like they should try to steal money from the federal government.
They're claiming that that extends to trying to affect election processes, which is a real stretch and going to be very difficult to fulfill by the elements of the law.
They're charging him with obstruction of justice, suggesting that he tried to interfere with an official government proceeding.
Again, that's going to be a bit of a stretch because it's going to be hard to show that he actively attempted to overthrow the election rather than exercising his free speech rights in pursuit of a specious legal theory.
That's going to be the defense.
The defense is going to be, I honestly thought that this legal theory might be good, and I'm allowed to pursue that because this is still America and you don't get to prosecute me for that.
He's being charged also with civil rights violations.
The idea here is that he is attempting to essentially have votes thrown out.
So usually this charge is brought when you literally stuff a ballot box or you take a box of ballots and you throw them in the river or dead people vote in 1960 and make John F. Kennedy president.
You put them in a locker in Michigan.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You do those sorts of things.
That's where this is charged.
Usually it doesn't apply there.
And then there's a fourth charge that is again related to the idea that he put together false slates of electors and then attempted to submit that.
The difficulty in proving any of these cases is multifold.
The first one is that as an element to the case in virtually all of these things is intent.
You have to prove somehow that Donald Trump knew for a fact that he had lost the election and thus all subsequent efforts were not dedicated toward attempting to preserve his purported election victory, but actively were an attempt to subvert a thing that he knew was not true.
Well, as I've said, the problem with Trump is that trying to establish intent crimes with Trump is incredibly difficult because Donald Trump actually believes the thing that he is saying at any given moment.
So it is quite plausible that that night he thought he had lost and by the next morning he thought that he had won.
That sort of thing is not unusual with Trump ever.
I mean, we all know this.
We've seen him switch in real time his positions and believe it both times.
So intent crimes are very, very difficult to charge with Donald Trump.
Again, the charges in law are a large-scale stretch.
January 6th gets mentioned multiple times here.
But again, the defense there is going to be, I didn't tell people to invade the Capitol building.
I told them to peacefully protest at the Capitol building.
You may be angry at me that I didn't tell them to get out, but I didn't make them go in in the first place.
So that doesn't actually count as a conspiracy.
You've shown no actual proof that I told the oath keepers to go in and attempt to overthrow the election.
You can blame me for being inflammatory.
But inflammatory is not prosecutable, right?
So this is so that's going to be his defense.
Again, I believe this thing is being charged in front of a federal judge appointed by Barack Obama, which means presumably a very unfriendly federal judge.
I'm not sure which district this is being charged in, actually.
I have to look that up real fast.
It looks like it is being charged in D.C.
So obviously that means that he's at a real disadvantage in this case because a D.C. jury is going to be a lot less friendly to him than say a Florida jury would be.
And that's basically what I assume Jack Smith is counting on here.
So then the question becomes how long the trial actually takes?
When does the trial actually begin?
He's going to be able to make the case, and I think it's a pretty solid case, that it should be delayed until after the election.
The reason that he's going to be able to say that is he's going to say, listen, I have at least two major ongoing legal cases.
I have the Manhattan DA's case, right?
Which is, again, that one is complete BS.
And then I also have the classified documents case being charged by Jack Smith down in Florida.
And I'm probably going to get indicted in Georgia.
And how do you expect me to simultaneously perform four defenses in the space of 12 months?
You can't.
So really, what you should do is you should delay this trial until after the election.
We already know that the Florida trial is likely to begin sometime in the middle of next year, right in the middle of the election cycle.
I think the date was set for May 20th.
I think that's right.
So that means that you'll probably get a verdict in that trial pretty quickly.
I would imagine that that case is, to me, that's the most dangerous case to Trump.
Of the indictments that have come down so far, clearly the classified documents one is the most dangerous case on the legal level.
It's happening in Florida, which is Red State, and it's a Trump judge who's still a judge.
Yeah, he has the documents.
Right, exactly.
I mean, the biggest problem for Trump is if you're going to do the criming, don't do the criming on tape.
For a first rule of criming, don't do crime on tape.
It's just, you know, as your lawyer, folks, don't do the crime on the tape.
It's just a bad idea.
So it's so that's the big problem for Trump.
He's going to make the case essentially to the jury in that case for jury nullification.
He's going to say, this shouldn't have been charged, not because I didn't do it.
It shouldn't be charged because I wasn't risking national security and because they didn't charge Hillary Clinton.
And it's unfair that Hillary gets to skate and I'm going to get charged for all of this.
And it's obviously political.
They're trying to stop me in the middle of an election cycle.
So that's kind of where things stand, legally speaking, right now.
So the DC indictment, out of all Trump's 500 indictments and coming indictments, in terms of risk to him, where do you rank the D.C. indictment?
I would rank this one at number two.
I think the Florida is the riskiest one because I think the New York one is not particularly risky.
I think even a New York jury is going to have a real tough time finding Donald Trump in violation of a state campaign finance law that's connected to a federal campaign finance law that's connected to a payoff he made to Stormy Daniels in 2015.
Which would effectively be an in-kind contribution to his own campaign.
Yes.
I mean, again, I think that one's real tough.
So I think that one's super weak.
I think that the Georgia case is going to be about as strong as the D.C. case because it's a very similar case.
It's going to be basically very similar charges, but on a state level with regard to him pressuring Brad Raffensperger to supposedly shift votes.
Although his defense is going to be in that case, I wasn't telling him to shift votes.
I was saying, I know that there's fraud.
All I need is this number of votes to win.
I certainly know there's been more fraud than that.
So you're telling me you can't find that number of votes that are fraudulent, right?
That's what he's going to say.
So that seems to me like a fairly solid defense, actually, because again, it goes to intent.
It's also in Georgia.
It depends where in Georgia it's held.
If it's held in Fulton County, it looks a lot like D.C.
So those kind of tie for a second.
Again, I think the most dangerous indictment for him remains the classified documents case because to me, on an evidentiary level, this is just putting on my lawyer hat, on an evidentiary level, they almost have him dead to rights on that one.
I mean, he literally said on tape, here is a classified document.
I could have declassified it and I didn't declassify it.
Would you like to see this document right now?
It's always with Trump the fact that they didn't do this.
Hillary Clinton did virtually the same thing, didn't have the right of a president to declassify the documents, and they didn't prosecute her and said it wasn't intentional when she actually bleach-bit her phone.
Right.
And that's going to be his defense.
His defense is going to be that the reason you didn't go after Hillary is because you said she didn't intend to disseminate the documents to foreign powers, essentially.
There is no proof or even implication that I intended to disseminate these documents to foreign powers.
The most obvious explanation, as I said, literally the day that this news broke, is that Donald Trump likes things and he decides to keep them.
Any attempt to complicate Donald Trump is always an exercise in tomfoolery.
Whether it's intellectualizing Trumpism as a sort of coherent philosophy or whether it's attempting to determine why the man kept the box of documents he should have given back to the National Archives, Occam's razors are always apply with Donald Trump.
The most simple explanation is always true.
Donald Trump likes things and so he keeps them.
The man literally kept Israeli antiquities just because he likes them.
His entire power comes from the fact that he is treated differently.
Like I would have had no objection to the press treating him as badly as they did if they also treated Democrats the same way.
That's the way I want them to treat people in power.
The original sin with regard to this case is that Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted, which, by the way, is the reason Donald Trump is being prosecuted because he literally said to his lawyers, remember that thing Hillary did over there?
Can you do that for me?
Which means that if Hillary had been prosecuted, you know, he wouldn't have said that.
Right.
Right.
So again.
And isn't there just at a higher political level, getting out of the legal minutiae here?
We, as a tradition in America, don't imprison former presidents and we don't imprison the leader of the opposition.
And regardless of, okay, he technically violated this statute with a documents case or whatever.
You're making me nostalgia with myself.
I know.
I mean, yeah, nostalgic for five years ago.
Isn't there just something really banana Republic-y about arresting the leadership?
This, by the way, also is a case that if Trump were more articulate, he should be making.
We now know, because of the collapse of Hunter Biden's sweetheart deal, we know the DOJ is corrupt.
We know it is corrupt at the highest levels.
We saw it in court where the guy could not defend, was obviously trying to put something past a judge.
If they had gotten a friendly judge, she might have overlooked it.
But in fact, she saw that it was being put past her.
We know they're corrupt now.
And I think that that's a case that I would be making on the state.
Well, he is going to be making that case.
And that is going to be his strongest case.
If he can enunciate it.
The thing that is going to Trump's benefit is the fact that the Biden DOJ is so obviously and clearly corrupt.
I mean, the Biden sweetheart deal, for folks who didn't watch what actually happened here, there's a pretty simple way to understand this.
Hunter Biden was charged with two sets of crimes.
One was financial crimes, tax fraud.
The other, and he pled guilty to misdemeanors.
And the other was the gun charge.
In the financial crimes, there was nothing in there that said we waive all future charges on financial crimes.
Nothing like that.
It said nothing about that.
In the gun crime case, which ended up being diverted, he ended up in no charges.
You get to go to drug rehab or whatever.
It said in there, in exchange for this, anything that's mentioned in the financial crimes case, we will now waive.
And so it was clear that the DOJ was attempting to waive the crimes that for an interview, all of the crimes, everything.
And so the defense thought that was the case, which is why they were signing on to the plea deal in the first place.
And the DOJ thought that was the case, but they didn't want the judge to know that was the case because it's so obviously corrupt.
It gets in front of the judge.
The judge looks at this and says, hold up.
So it's not in the charging document that you're actually giving me that you want me to sign off on.
It's in this other document I have no actual jurisdiction over.
And I'm supposed to apply that document to this.
You're clearly attempting to lie to the American people by putting the sweetheart deal in a document that is not available publicly.
At that point, the DOJ was so embarrassed by the public disclosure of this that they immediately say, no, no, no, we didn't mean that at all.
None of this is real.
And Hunter Biden's attorney goes, wait, if it's not real, we have no deal.
And the whole thing blows up, right?
So what happened here is a pretty textbook case of the DOJ at Merrick Garland's direction, because that's how this happens, which means at Joe Biden's direction, attempting to let Hunter Biden off the hook for a wide variety of crimes, which, again, that is getting worse for Joe Biden.
I mean, all that, the Hunter Biden stuff is going to get worse.
So let's say they put Trump in prison.
Let's say one of the 7,000 indictments actually sticks.
Worth remembering, we have had people run for president from prison before.
Eugene Debs got 8% of the vote.
He was a socialist, so very much out of the mainstream of the American political tradition.
He still got 8% of the vote when he was sitting in the can.
As far as I know, there's no extra special rule and restriction on how you can run for president.
The Constitution lays it out, even if the guy's wearing an orange jumpsuit, Donald Trump could run for president from prison.
He could win the presidency from prison, and it would probably help him if he's sitting there.
I think it would help him, but I actually think he would get the exact same amount of votes.
I think at this point, they're playing a psyop on us.
The Democrats are actually playing a psyop, which is that they know the more they persecute him, the more his base will stick.
And the less popular he will be among independents and the people who actually decide the election.
I mean, I totally agree with that, Matt.
I also think that nothing, we now live in the era of nothing matters, and truly nothing matters except for the turnout numbers in 2024.
That's the entire game here, right?
If Biden gets low turnout, Trump could win even under those circumstances.
Well, you know, I've long said, Ben, and I learned this from Mitch Daniels, former governor of Indiana, there are two ways to beat the left.
You can either out-argue them or you can out-breed them.
And when you want to talk about the next generation of Americans, this is real and happening now, folks.
The pro-life movement is scoring all sorts of victories.
But did you know the abortion pill accounts for over half of the abortions committed in this country?
More than 1,000 pre-born children die at the hand of this poison every single day.
Pre-born is the organization providing a solution to that devastating situation.
Women are being fed the abortion pill and led to believe that it's an easy and safe way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, whatever euphemisms they use.
But they are not being told the truth about the harmful side effects and, of course, the emotional trauma left behind.
This is a heartbreaking reality that needs to be addressed.
Pre-born network clinics are there for these women, offering love, hope, and an abortion reversal pill, thank God, which can save their baby if taken soon enough.
Craft Violating Physics Laws00:09:58
But they cannot do this without our help as all their services are free.
For just $28, you can help hurting women and at-risk babies.
Dial pound250 and say the keyword baby.
Or visit preborn.com slash backstage.
All gifts are tax deductible.
You will never regret saving a child's life.
That is pound250, say baby.
That's the code word.
Or visit preborn.com slash backstage.
And we're talking about the babies and the sweet babies and the daddy and everything.
I know we have to get to this because it's here on my schedule.
And I'm just actually, before we get to this, I'm going to take my phone out right now and I'm going to set a timer.
I'm going to set a timer.
Let's do it.
I don't, I can't.
I'm going to set a timer for six minutes.
Oh, I was hoping more like 90 seconds.
Here we I'm being very generous here with a one to that because this stupid nonsense forget about the indictments the stupid nonsense going on at Capitol Hill with the UFO hearings and the friend of a friend of somebody's cousin saw a little glimmer of light in the sky.
Okay, I'm clicking start.
Here we go.
Six minutes.
Matt, do you have any thoughts?
I have more thoughts than can fit in six minutes.
I feel like I'm at a disadvantage here.
I think the main point, first of all, as I've tried to explain to Ben when I destroyed him in this debate a couple days ago, is that if you go into this already having decided, as at least two of the people in this room have, that you're not willing to listen to the evidence, that no evidence could possibly convince you because you are committed ahead of time to the proposition that aliens have never visited Earth or that they don't even exist.
They don't exist.
Which is Michael's absurd idea.
Then, of course, you're not going to be convinced by this.
But if you are open-minded, as I am and I think I'm very known to be open-minded.
Oh, absolutely.
And I think you listen, and what do we have?
We have documentation.
We have photographs.
We have video of these crafts in the sky.
A little blurry.
We have expert eyewitness testimony.
I don't just mean the people that are testifying in Congress.
I mean Navy pilots who are actual experts.
Okay, I'll tell you what, I'll buttress your ridiculous point of view.
Nancy Mays and other Republicans were interviewing some of these people who say that they have firsthand knowledge of these vehicles crashing and even potential lifeworms being found on it.
Take it away.
If you believe we have crashed craft, stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?
As I've stated publicly already in my News Nation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries.
Yeah.
Were they, I guess, human or non-human biologics?
Non-human, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.
Non-human?
What do you think?
They're raccoons?
Can I ask you about a word?
I pay attention to little.
Have you ever heard the word biologics before in your life?
I've maybe heard it in the context of medicine.
Occasionally, it's word.
That's a very precise word.
He's not saying we pulled ET out of the craft.
What is a non-human biologic, I don't know, like an ant crawled into the, it's so vague all the time.
It's a person.
He hasn't seen anything.
He hasn't seen it.
This guy hasn't seen it.
No, it's always like my cousin's friend's buddy's nephew.
But this is, no, hold on a second.
This is a guy.
This is what he does.
He's on.
He works with the current.
He hasn't personally.
He doesn't personally see all of it.
He's talked to people that I have.
So if that's all that we had, then I would agree that that's not very compelling.
But when you add, so we're just adding evidence on top of evidence on top of evidence.
So here's my question to you.
You're anti-alien too, aren't you?
No, no, no, no.
But I don't believe they're here, but I believe they're.
Okay, you're wrong also.
So we know that there are these crafts in the sky that are doing things that defy the laws of physics.
We understand them.
We've seen them.
Okay.
We can see the video.
What are they?
Okay.
So excellent question, Matt, and I'm so glad you asked.
So two points.
One, if evidence were presented that were overwhelming in nature, I would shift my opinion.
But these are outstanding allegations that require outstanding evidence.
Okay?
Not all claims require equivalent evidence.
If I claim that I'm going to drink from this cup of water, the amount of evidence that it will require to prove that claim is very small.
I would just have to drink from this cup of water.
If I were to claim that there is a massive dragon just outside the door right here who's about to eat you, I would presumably have to now provide you like actual physical evidence that that is a thing.
So that's a pretty large standard.
Well, we have the dragon, Ben.
We have the dragon.
Okay, so aside from your claim that we have the dragon, aside from that, the actual, let me ask you this.
Do you think that's the one?
Well, no, no, so this is, so in order for me to answer the question, I have to, as all Jews would, ask a question, okay?
Which is, do you think that there are things that defy the laws of physics in the physical universe?
Because that is the phraseology you just.
You just began by suggesting that people have observed craft in the sky that seem to violate the laws of physics.
So let me ask you, do you believe in the laws of physics?
Because if you actually believe in the laws of physics, that might suggest that you now have two choices.
One, you have to believe that somehow these alien spacecraft defy those laws of physics, which are irrevocable and non-changeable, or two miraculous.
Or two, that there has been some form of optical illusion or radar malfunction.
No, which would explain as spiritual being.
We could be incorrect about the laws.
Yeah, that's why I said, as we understand them.
Right.
Okay.
So that's the quality.
we would have to be wrong about in terms of the laws of physics are things like apparently the ionization of the atmosphere in the wake of objects that are so what we have we have and these are these are fairly basic physical principles we We have physical objects in the sky that are flying at high rates of speed, stop on a dime, and then go up or go down.
So we don't know.
We would have no idea how to create something that can do that.
So this is someone has possession.
To do that on radar or at very large distances that scientists have suggested also could be.
And again, these are could be's.
Okay, so let's put the stack up these two possibilities.
One, these are alien spacecraft that come from light years away to Earth to fly around, be observed by radar, and then leave.
Okay, that's possibility number one.
Possibility number two.
You said they leave.
Oh, well, not be visible anymore.
Okay.
Or possibility number two.
Or possibility number two.
Optical illusion or radar malfunction.
Which have you personally experienced more times?
Optical illusion and radar malfunction?
Like when you look at the mass of the mass of the curve, radar malfunction, I don't have a radar.
Can I introduce some evidence into this evidence list?
You think that when you look out into the distance on a real hot day, you think it's a lake out there or you think that maybe that's actually just the heat rising from the surface.
It's a Martian lake.
They have radar where they're locked in on an object that's moving.
It does require that they have to be able to bend space-time, fly from another galaxy, arrive here, and then their spark plugs jam and they crash.
This is the thing, this is the part that loses me.
If they have the possibility of violating what we think of as the laws of physics, and then they come here, and then it's like putt, putt, putt, oh, I'm out of gas.
They just crash.
The government is good at things.
Thank you so much.
Oh, my God.
Hang on, sir.
We haven't even gone.
I'd like to introduce one piece of evidence here.
How do I stop this?
I'm kind of a Luddite.
I can't stop it.
Here's a piece of evidence.
And I've never introduced this before.
You know, my view is that aliens are just angels and demons for libs who don't believe in anything beyond the material world.
That's crazy, too.
But here's my piece of evidence.
Aleister Crowley, the most famous occultist and witch.
A Satanist, yeah.
Satanist.
He once had a vision of a demon.
I'm sure he had many visions of a demon.
But one time he sketched out the vision that he had of a demon.
We don't have the graphic pulled, and I frankly don't even want to have to look at it.
If you look at it, it just looks like people say aliens look.
They're just demons, guys.
But I understand.
Flying around in spacecraft?
Yeah.
Well, appearing to, yeah, because they're pure spirit and not body.
What are the demons?
That's why we don't have the bodies.
We have demobiologics, which is like a chicken sandwich some Navy pilot had or some like Chinese run or something.
Why are demons flying?
This is also one of my favorite graphics.
I love this.
Yes, yes.
This one's great.
Reported UFO sightings.
Do you notice reported?
Right.
No, no, no.
Reported.
So this is what there's not a lot of reports coming from China because they're not telling us about them.
What about Africa or Latin America or even Canada?
Who's going to report in Africa?
Or maybe it's a bunch of crazy people in America who have cell phones.
Yeah.
Maybe it's a bunch of crazy people who are on social media all day.
So that's Western society, modern technology, lots of cell phones.
That's where you see the sightings.
In places like China, they're not going to report it.
They're smarter than that.
They're not going to tell us about it.
Africa, who's doing the reporting in Africa?
Who's doing the reporting in the savannah?
Maybe it turns out that when people are not bored and actually have to fight to survive, they don't crap about stupid optical illusions in the sky.
There's also another question.
When they found the slightest evidence that there was possible life on Mars, this was in the 1980s.
They found the possibility that there had once been water.
It was on the front page of the New York Post.
Why would they hide this?
Why is this a secret?
That's a very good question.
That's the question.
I would love for us to be talking about that question so we could get past this silly question of whether they exist in the first place.
Okay, so what's your theory?
Why they're hiding it?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, right now, they're actually admitting it.
So, like, now...
Now, yeah, but why hide it up till now?
Are they good at hiding things to the government?
Are they good at anything, the government?
Like they're so good that for 70 years, they've been hiding the greatest discovery in the history of the world.
No, I think this actually works exactly like you would expect it to.
Like early on, before the internet and before everyone had cell phones and everything, they could easily hide it because they didn't have to tell us.
You have some farmer in Kansas says, I saw a UFO.
It's easy for the government to say, oh, that guy's crazy.
But now there's so many videos coming out and you got Navy pilots and all this stuff.
They have to say something.
And so now we have some whistleblowers coming out.
It's kind of working exactly as you would expect it to.
It's working exactly.
Barbie's Choice: Motherhood and Coffee00:14:51
Michael, I'm going to hang myself.
Can we move on?
My only question, look, I'd happily move on, except I don't know who owns part of Daily Wire right now because I always assumed that you were part owner of the company and that these guys were just hired help.
But then I learned today on the Matt Walsh show that in fact, the turntables may have turned or something.
Well, he's not my boss anymore, though, because I owned him.
Legally, he is now my employee.
This is written into law.
A lot of people don't know this.
But if you, this is an actual thing.
If you own your boss with a YouTube video, then after that, he actually becomes your subordinate.
So it's a little known loot hole in our labor laws.
But that's the situation.
That is a shocking.
That is a shocking development to me.
Listen, I urge you to try to cash a check under those premiums.
Are they not teaching that at Harvard Law?
Hang on a second.
There's a bit I have to do.
I was, Ben, this is an Uno card.
So I was told off stage that the kids will understand that joke and they'll relate to it.
I don't care.
Even I understand that joke.
I don't know.
I had this whole conversation about it.
And I was told the kids, the kids are emotionally 12 years old.
I think we've all learned something here today.
Yep.
Yeah.
Listen, while we're owning Ben, I have a time.
Forget about the AOL.
In violation of the 13th Amendment.
I have to, I, in preparation for this show tonight, I know you hate Barbie.
I know that you hate Barbie so much.
And it became so much.
If you were to defend Barbie, I'm going to come across anyone.
I'm not doing.
Listen, I went into it wanting to like Barbie because I did want to disagree with him and I said we wouldn't.
But I kept an open mind and I thought, look, I'm not going to do it just to, I sincerely, I think it's terrific.
I think it's anti-feminist.
I know you disagree so much so that the view featured your harangue, your violent attack on Barbie and Ken on their show.
Get worked up over a doll movie.
Like it reminds me of the Bud Light scandal or whatever.
Is there not something more important going on in the world to get super passionate about?
But it is, to Joy's point, it kind of shows how the right-wing influencers are actually out of touch with actual Republicans.
I'm so taken by some of these right-wing men who have all these thoughts on masculinity.
Like somehow the Barbie movie is going to make them feel emasculated.
No, caring so much about it is honestly the most emasculating thing I could think about.
Wasn't that Ben Shapiro?
Yeah.
Because if you're sitting there and you flipped it on a head and it was this.
He looks like he should be in the bar.
If you flip.
Why?
because I have a rippling six-pack.
Apparently, you've got energy.
This is...
Meanwhile, but...
Sorry, I'm not you guys, but they are the ones...
These people celebrate the movie.
It's some great triumph.
And then if we, so it's the same thing.
We criticize it.
Well, why do you care so much?
You're the one saying it's the great feminist triumph in the first place.
This is my face tattoo syndrome routine.
It's like you go into the Starbucks and there's some weirdo with a face tattoo and then you look at the face tattoo, like, what are you looking at?
Like, your face tattoo.
It's like, well, you're the ones who decided that Barbie was not just a movie about a child's toy.
You decided that it was a movie about the power of feminism, and it was so important that every child had to see it so that girls could be empowered.
And then I'm like, well, I think that it's a crappy movie.
I don't think it's funny.
I think it's kind of stupid.
I think that it promotes a bad message.
And you're like, oh, how dare you be upset about this movie that's going to earn a billion dollars at the box.
You did set the doll on fire.
Let's let me burn up.
It's a Barbenheimer joke, first of all.
Second of all, I made a lot of money off of that.
And so they asked me, my producers came to me and they said, with all the money that we've made off of that Barbie review, what would you like to do with that?
And I said, well, you have to keep investing in the business.
So we obviously have to buy like 800 more Barbies and set them on fire.
I mean, you just arbitrage.
That's right.
You have to keep investing in the business.
You don't pull out until the business is essentially done.
Quick note to Alyssa Farah, who I met Alyssa Farah when I was in president and vice president of Mike Pence's office in the Oval Office.
And she was a large-scale fan of the show at the time.
Really?
Oh, yes.
And so her mock horror at learning that I dislike the Barbie movie, I find rather unconvincing.
What she has here is very strong 2012 GOP energy, which is, you know, who cares about the culture?
Let's just talk about things that matter.
Like regulatory reform.
Regulatory reform.
I think we should pause here for a moment.
Let's hear.
Did you like this Barbie movie?
I did.
I'll give you a small.
I'm proud of you for coming out as a gay man.
Listen, good for you.
Living your truth.
Grew up in New York.
I went to a certain university.
Yeah, that's really, you know, no socks in my loafers.
I sincerely liked it because.
You're the worst person.
Listen, this is not certain movies.
Certain movies, I will grant you.
That's kind of a sophisticated conversation that I love to be a part of.
I try in some movies.
I'll totally grant, maybe I'm inclined to read a little too much into it or something like that.
I don't think that's what's going on here.
I think the movie is very clearly anti-feminist.
Here's my brief evidence for it.
Barbie land is a feminist utopia.
It's established that way from the opening scene.
The opening scene, this is spoiler alert, by the way.
The opening scene is an homage to 2001 A Space Odyssey.
And the little girls are having fun playing with their baby dolls until Barbie comes around.
And Barbie, the symbol of feminism, comes in and inspires these girls to murder their baby dolls and to pursue Barbie.
Then in Barbie Land, the women run everything and they're all feminists.
The woman is a president, woman's a doctor, woman's this, woman's that.
The men are total second class.
Technically, a man who's playing a woman is a doctor, but yes.
A man.
Oh, yeah, I know.
But the trans thing is there as part of the Barbie universe, but it's not totally emphasized.
And so in Barbie Land, you get a view of all of the Barbies.
And oh, this Barbie is this figure and this, that, and the other thing.
Except for one, gets written out very early on.
There's a pregnant Barbie, but then very quickly they say, oh, no, she's not allowed to be here.
We got rid of her really quickly.
And in Barbie land, Barbie's not totally happy.
I mean, she's happy in the sense that it's the same fun party every single day, but there's no future.
There's only this perpetual present.
And then she goes into the real world.
And by the way, even when the feminist guru character offers Barbie the chance to go into the real world to see what it's like and to try to fix some problems, she says, okay, you take the red pill or the blue pill.
The red pill is the Birkenstocks.
The blue pill is the high heels.
What does Barbie say?
She goes, oh, I have the choice.
Good.
I'll take the high heels, please.
I want to just be a happy woman.
And the feminist says, oh, you weren't supposed to pick that.
You don't actually have the choice.
You've got to wear the Birkenstocks, go into the real world.
So she goes into the real world.
The real world is supposedly a patriarchy.
And you hear the word patriarchy, as you pointed out, Ben.
You hear the word patriarchy like a dozen.
Double digits.
Yeah.
But what's very interesting is the actions that move the plot along that actually have consequences in the world, they're all done by women in very subtle ways.
A woman who draws a little picture of Barbie, a woman who has a thought about death and the future and generations.
The central theme of the whole movie is motherhood.
And so then I'm not, I won't go, maybe I'll go into it a little bit more on my show tomorrow, but let's fast forward.
We'll go back to aliens.
This is where I think where Greta Gerwig, who is a fairly conservative filmmaker, if you watch Ladybird, where Greta Gerwig, I think, really tips her hand, and this is a major spoiler alert.
At the very end, there's this scene where after the big feminist speech, the woman is complaining.
She says, it's so impossible to be a woman because we're expected to be girl bosses.
We're expected to work all these jobs.
The things she's complaining about are the result of feminism, not traditional society.
Then Barbie is given the choice.
Do you stay in the feminist utopia Barbie land?
Do you go into the real world, which is supposedly a patriarchy?
She chooses the real world.
She goes out there and she meets the creator of Barbie, Rhea Perlman.
Great scene.
And Rhea Perlman actually says, she says, well, what about all this, you know, this awful world out here?
She goes, look, we come up with all these make-believe things to make sense of the complicated world.
We make things up like Barbie, like patriarchy.
So she actually says this notion of the patriarchy is a made-up thing.
And then here's the thing.
But then she's saying that the patriarchy itself is a thing that we adopt.
No, she's saying, she's saying the notion of patriarchy.
And here's the final proof of it.
The final scene, right before Barbie decides, okay, this is going to be my life in the real world.
The montage of what she can achieve in the real world is not her going out to be a girl boss at some widget company or whatever.
It's motherhood.
And then the very final scene, this is the clincher where I think you couldn't deny it.
She's walking in, and it's supposed to be the big triumph of feminist Barbie.
She's walking in for her job interview.
Walks up to the secretary and she says, hi, my name is Barbara Handel, and I'm here for my appointment.
And the woman says, okay, what can I do for you?
What are you here for?
And she says, not, I'm here for my job interview.
She says, I'm here to see my gynecologist.
Which is, it's a play on the motherhood from the beginning.
It's a play on Barbie.
Wait, I have to say this.
I can't defend you because I didn't see Barbie because I'm a heterosexual adult, adult male.
But I have to say that Greta Gerwig is not a radical feminist director, just having seen Ladybird, which is quite nice.
No, but she is, but she, like Noah Baumbach, her paramour.
Yeah, who also is against that wonderful movie about divorce.
Oh, I can't believe you liked that movie.
It was about how destructive divorce was.
That entire movie is about a bunch of self-obsessed, narcissistic jackasses.
But how destructive.
People don't give a shit about their kid.
That's what that movie is about.
And somehow I'm supposed to care about these people and their story.
No, no, no, no.
It was about how destructive they are.
You're right.
These are all secrets.
Do you?
No, I didn't say she was conservative.
But she's not a person.
Here's what I will tell you.
Anti-feminist.
She's anti-feminist.
You think she intentionally made this broad side attack on feminism itself?
I mean, you would have to have a far conservative, like hardcore conservative to do that.
Wait, wait, wait.
Here's what actually happened.
No, wait, no, it actually happened.
Have you seen the movie?
You haven't seen the movie quite.
Hold on.
All right, Drew.
There is a movement now among highly intelligent, semi-left-wing women rejecting feminism.
It is growing up, and the only person covering it is me.
I actually listen to what they say.
What?
Like the Red Scare podcast, right?
Yes, the Red Scare, Mary Harrington.
These are women who identify as more or less left-wing, but they suddenly say, you know, these babies are kind of nice and were being written out of existence by the transgender movement, which is a logical extension of feminism.
They're not dumb, and they see this, and I'm not, I haven't seen the movie and really don't want to, except now I'll have to.
This whole conversation makes me want to take a sleeping pill, but I have to get to the rest of the show, which is why I rely on Black Rifle Coffee.
Black Rifle Coffee literally fuels the Daily Wire.
Our office drinks about 40 pounds of their coffee every week.
I'm having like two tonight just to get through this garbage.
If you haven't tried Black Rifle Coffee yet, you need to.
A great place to start is their Complete Domission Fuel Sampler, giving you a taste of the entire spectrum of Black Rifle Coffee Flavor Profiles, offering four ounce bags of the following roasts, the Silencer Smooth, AK-47 Espresso, Beyond Black, and Just Black.
The only hard part will be picking a favorite amongst these classics.
Black Rifle Coffee is a veteran-founded coffee company operated by principled men and women who honor those who protect, defend, and support our country.
With every purchase you make, they give back.
Stop running out of coffee, sign up for a coffee club subscription, have black rifle coffee delivered straight to your door on a schedule.
Coffee club subscribers receive their high-quality coffee at lower prices with free shipping.
Plus, they get early access to exclusive deals and prices.
Go to blackriflecoffee.com, use promo code backstage.
You check out for 10% off your order.
That's blackriflecoffee.com.
Use promo code backstage for 10% off.
Black Rifle Coffee, America's coffee.
Okay, so let me now give a couple pronged response.
One, there's the movie that you are seeing, and then there's the movie that the American public is seeing.
Okay, you're doing a real Straussian esoteric read on this film.
I don't think it's that esoteric, but yeah, it's definitely a deep read on Barbie.
Okay, the surface read on Barbie is nothing remotely like this.
The surface read on Barbie is that Barbie herself, when she goes into the real world, is immediately victimized by the patriarchy.
That Ken, when he goes back to Barbie land, immediately establishes the horrors of the Kendom, which must be overcome.
And the conclusion...
The women love Kendem, though.
Until they are disabused of their love of Kendem by the truth, which is feminism.
At which point, they do not actually...
The normal, by the way, course that this movie would take if you were to actively make it in an anti-feminist direction is that Barbie Land would become more equal.
Everyone would treat each other as an individual.
That is not what happens.
Instead, they reestablish the matriarchy at the end with the men in the subservient position.
And the tagline at the end where she learns emotion and suggests to go back to the real world and therefore goes to the gynecologist is not about motherhood.
It's a throwaway joke about her growing a vagina because that's the entire film.
The film has these kinds of jokes littered throughout it.
The notion that this is like a deep read on feminism is not right.
The only plausible notion I can see is that Greta Gerwick herself is trapped by feminism, meaning that she made a movie that was meant to be an homage to feminism.
It was meant to be a rip on the patriarchy.
And she finds herself unable, because she is not truly, as you say, like an ardent feminist, she finds herself in this false bind of not being able to get out.
And so what that's reflected in is a very messy movie.
The movie is a thematic mess.
There are a bunch of elements of it that do not fit your narrative, and they don't fit my narrative.
And the reason is because they're in conflict with one another.
think so i mean i i just there is literally a speech where she where barbie articulates that in order to live as a woman in the real world you have to buy fully into delusion or you have to be considered crazy weird barbie who is lesbian kate mckinnon weird barbie right Those are the only two choices.
There's no third choice whereby you can live a happy life as a traditional woman.
This is for babe.
But then what does she do?
You're right that she's troubled by the America Ferrer's speech does not America Ferreira's speech is not about how the solution to this is traditional joys of motherhood.
It's about how it's impossible because men are evil pigs for women to live happily.
Right.
No, there is.
She literally says that in the speech.
No, no, this is the point.
You're right that in these speeches, they're trying to work through the problems of feminism and they're speaking as many American and main liberal women would speak today.
And they feel that it's a trap.
But then at the end of the movie, the conclusion, the reconciliation of these problems.
I have a question.
Why does the left love it?
Simple question.
Why are the women that you like it?
Wait, can I tell you?
Why?
Is it because are they misreading it?
Are you misreading?
Because we're misreading it.
They're misreading it.
Of course.
They don't know what a man is.
Okay, so the 50, 60, 70 million people who are watching, you think they're reading it like you, or you think they're reading it like the Ladies of the View?
I don't know how they're reading it.
I do.
I do, but I can't.
I want to ask you a question about that.
Because what I did is I went and see Oppenheimer simply for the experience of having three hours of not watching Barbie.
And I thought Oppenheimer was a really good movie.
I thought it was, in fact, the first really good movie that guy has made.
I know everybody's, I want to love him, but I thought it was the first movie he's made since the Dark Knight trilogy that was really good.
And one of the things that truly impressed me about Oppenheimer was how art trumps politics.
Because in politics, you have to sit around and talk about, were we right to drop the bomb?
Yes, we were.
Why Women Are Misread00:07:37
No, we weren't.
That kind of thing.
You know, it's this binary choice that you have to make.
But in the arts, you can say we might have had to drop it.
It might still be an atrocity.
It might be an atrocity.
It might have been the best atrocity.
It might have been a good thing in the moment.
It might lead to the end of the world.
you can have this kind of complex vision of the world.
And so people are going to, people who are politicized are going to go to these movies and come out and say, well, he talked too much about the communists or he let the communists off them.
But that's not what he's doing.
He's actually making art, which is much more complex than politics.
So maybe she's doing the same thing.
Well, this is, I guess, this is, I don't know her politics.
And she's kind of coy in her politics.
But I will say, I think she's a genius filmmaker.
I think she's really an excellent filmmaker.
I think Ladybird was terrific.
Okay.
Forget Ladybird for a second because we can discuss.
I think Barbie was terrific.
It's good.
Oh, Barbie.
It's great filmmaking.
It is not even remotely great filmmaking.
It has about three laugh moments.
The movie's at least 20 minutes too long.
I was laughing the whole time.
It is too long, though.
The movie is a little bit more.
But all movies are too long.
All movies are too long.
But it's a great scene of comedy because it's all timing.
The only funny performance in the film is given by Ron Gosling.
He's excellent.
Margot Robbie is not funny.
I thought she was good.
Okay, but the... Ria Perlman was good.
She's the kind of writer who drops poost Barbie jokes.
From the middle of the film.
Which I lolled at.
I'll tell you.
Of course you did because this movie was written for you.
It really was.
It was written for upper-class bingo females.
Upper-class white females.
That's what it was written for.
Okay, you know who it was.
Because you know who this was not written for?
True, but low.
You know who this was not written for?
The actual people who like Barbies, namely young girls.
It was not gay.
But you know who's showing up at the theater?
I know because I was there because I had to go to this damn thing.
I was there, and you know who it was?
It was mommies and their eight-year-old girls.
And all those eight-year-old girls were being told on the screen by a man playing a woman that the way that women are to be upheld in society is to literally separate from the men.
This is the message.
One of the messages in the bad Barbie land.
In the good place, there are no men.
They don't exist.
The only men in the good place.
No, the bad place is Barbie land.
That's why Barbie leaves.
She leaves because she's become too human, okay?
It's this.
Isn't she like immediately assaulted as soon as she gets to the bottom?
Yes, she's slapped on the ass immediately.
But she still chooses to go back because she likes it.
But also patriarchy.
But Michael, the existence of this trans person in the film at all completely destroys your theory that this is a very good thing.
This is correct, of course.
The trans person is, I guess, my theory.
It's hit on by Ryan Gosling in the film as a, but my theory is.
The other person's there to make some kind of anti- Well, no, they're pointing out Barbie has all of these very feminist aspects to it, including the transgenderism.
I'm going to go to see Margot Robbie's.
And Mario Robbie is.
Margot Robbie is great in the movie.
Let's just leave it at that.
But no, I guess my theory hinges on Barbie land as a feminist utopia being the sort of thing that ought to be rejected as it is by the protagonist at the end of the movie.
And yet it's not destroyed.
If she wished to destroy it, then what she actually had to do was come to the natural denuement of the movie, which they're building toward because she mistreats Ken.
The way that this is supposed to conclude by Ken is a simp.
That's the problem.
He's not a man.
That's a ridiculous.
He's not a patriarch.
Now you're a man.
He literally comes back and he establishes a man's utopia in her view.
And the proper conclusion of this film would be for Barbie and Ken to get along and for them to actually share this utopia.
But that's not the case.
But they don't have a marriage.
They have a long-distance, low-effort relationship.
It's obviously gay, right?
Yeah.
By the way, the entire movie is just gay jokes about Ken and the fellow counts.
Right.
That's their problem.
There's not a real man like Ken.
I mean, let's face it.
There's a four-minute segment at the beginning where they literally make jokes about gay masturbation.
It's literally for that's the feminist view of the man, which is to you.
Now you got to know.
I can't deal with this.
Like, listen, I like Strauss, okay?
I read Leo Strauss.
I enjoy natural right and history.
I like all that stuff.
Okay, but I'm just going to point out to you that you're so unbelievably full of dog crap at this point.
This is not, at best, what you can say, are you claiming, in order for what you're saying to be true, Bredagorg has to be a conscious anti-feminist.
How do we put a time limit on aliens, but not on this?
Okay, I'll tell you what, I'll shift to a slightly related topic that you got in trouble for, which is you jerk, you outrageous bomb-throwing maniac, you criticized feminism and went viral for it.
What did you say?
Well, I mean, that's I haven't seen either movie, and I want to see Oppenheimer, but six kids, I can't see a three-hour movie in theater.
It's just impossible.
It's like impossible.
I did this last week.
Let me tell you, my wife is not super happy with me.
Yeah.
Oh, you're went by yourself.
I went with a couple of friends, and I showed up like 45 minutes after the kids had gotten back from camp.
It didn't go amazing.
Because I always had this idea that I should bring my wife for things like that.
And that's why I couldn't.
I asked my wife to see Indiana Jones and not this.
But anyway, as someone who hasn't seen it, what I take from this is that it's a good opportunity to reflect on the fact that feminism has killed more people than the Adam bomb, which is what I tweeted out.
It has killed far more people than the Adam bomb.
It's so subtle about it.
It's a simple simple fact.
It's actually a simple fact.
It was interesting to me to see a lot of, not surprising, but even some conservatives reacting to that.
It's like, I don't even know what you're talking about.
What could you possibly really?
60 million?
Like, we could just start with 60 million babies.
That's really just the beginning of it before we get to the utter destruction of the family by feminism.
Completely true.
But the interesting thing that happened from this is that it was an opportunity for what they call the gender critical feminists, who are the feminists who are critical of transgenderism, who have been really uncomfortable with me, but they're kind of like, I don't know this guy and what is a woman?
And they saw this and they're like, okay, screw this guy.
And they started passing along this video of Helen Joyce, who's a feminist writer.
And a year ago, she did an interview that I didn't even see, but she was talking about what is a woman.
And she made the argument that all these gender critical feminists think is quite brilliant, that someone like me, you know, I'm critical of transgenderism, but I don't understand that as a proponent of gender roles, I'm actually setting the stage for transgenderism.
And so that's where the conversation went, which I think is very interesting because what they don't understand is that is that among feminism's many sins, it is that it is the thing that actually set the stage for transgenderism.
Clearly, the logical and philosophical line and historical line is directly from feminism to transgenderism.
I mean, there's just no question about that.
Shulamith Firestone was writing about transgenderism in the early 1970s.
Right.
This is the statement you're making, which is on a purely philosophical level, which is that feminism in obliterating gender roles has made clear that men can be women and women can be men, because if there are no actual roles, then how exactly can't you be?
Gender non-binary is the status quo.
Then put that aside, just on a purely historic level, the line of thinking goes from essentially Bedford Ann to the next stage, Shulemith Firestone, forward to trans ideology.
I mean, Shulemuth Firestone literally writes an entire paper about how this is the case, how in the future, men will be able to have babies and women will be the ones who are inseminating them and all of this kind of stuff.
I mean, so that's in 1970.
So they're just wrong, factually speaking.
And one of the points I made to Helen in a really obvious one, that if traditional gender roles lead to transgenderism, well, traditional gender roles existed across the entire world.
They were the only thing that existed for thousands of years, and yet transgenderism did not exist in any of these cultures.
And if you go even now, as we did in the film, and go to cultures that still have these so-called traditional gender roles, they've never even heard of this stuff.
And within the future, feminism comes along and like a second later, you've got transgenderism.
Dark Spots and Correctors00:02:52
So it's super important.
By the way, just on the Oppenheimer note, since you tied it into this tweet, Oppenheimer was a communist and they should have denied his security clearance.
But he was not an official communist.
So this is under serious.
So did you, there's a letter from a Soviet agent to Laurente Beria in 1944, I believe, talking about how Oppenheimer was a funnel for information for the Soviets.
And whether that's true or whether that's false, there's no question that every single person, like in terms of was he a security risk, every single person he hung out with was like a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.
Do you want that guy having access to like all your, I mean, I understand why you do it in the middle of World War II where you have to win, but after that, there's a pretty good case that at that point you're like, you know, thanks for the service.
I really, it's, it's the, the, the thing about Oppenheimer that's really fascinating, only two of us have seen it, is that every argument that is made by Oppenheimer's opponents is correct.
Every single one of them, right?
They argue that the hydrogen bomb is going to be necessary because the Soviets will develop it without us developing it.
They argue that mutually assured destruction is going to prevent mass death, which it did.
If you look at the number of war deaths in the first half of the 20th century versus the last half of the 20th century, it plummets.
I mean, America loses 400,000 men during World War II.
And now in a typical, really horrific war like Afghanistan, we lose 2,400 men, right?
Like things are just radically different.
Going to a physicist for your politics was like.
So this is the part with the movie that I actually, and I really enjoyed it.
And I thought, enjoy is not the right word.
It's a fascinating movie.
It's a really fascinating movie.
It also has some of the best acting I've seen.
The acting is spectacular.
The cinematography is amazing.
The fact that Nolan is a movie god in the sense that he can make a three-hour film with one explosion and make hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office.
And I have to say, I hate three-hour films on principle.
I think there should be a federal law against them.
It went by.
Yeah, the first hour of it is unbelievably compelling.
You know, I sorry to cut you off, but I think, you know, obviously we're talking about Oppenheimer and the atom bomb was rough for Japan.
But one thing that's rough for a lot of people is dark spots on their skin.
Too true.
Great sequence.
Over at Genucelle sold out of their dark spot corrector.
And our listeners have been begging for a restock.
Well, I have great news.
The dark spot corrector is back in stock.
And thank goodness for that, because who needs the dark spot corrector more than most?
I usually don't do transitions at all.
And this is what happens when I try to do it.
There's a reason.
You know who has a lot of dark spots and terrible skins?
This show's producer, Mathis.
Mathis, I don't mean this to be harsh, but you are a disgusting, ugly freak.
I've never seen so many dark spots in my life.
Your dark spots have dark spots.
It's genuinely unsettling.
Put me in a bad headspace before the show.
One might even say it put me in a dark spot just looking at this grotesque, disgusting figure.
So please do the world a favor.
Better yet, do me a favor and fix your face, you monster, with Genucell's quick acting dark spot corrector.
Dark Spots and Doomer Politics00:15:04
Consider this, my gift to you as the new boss of the Daily Wire.
And you at home can enjoy the wonderful gift of Genuicelle products by going to genucelle.com slash backstage right now to get 70% off Genucelle's most popular package.
Genucell's most popular package features other summer essentials like their best-selling ultra-retinol moisturizer with a powerful retinol alternative for safe use in the sun.
You'll be amazed at how quickly you'll see results or get 100% of your money back guaranteed.
Go to genucelle.com slash backstage right now to get your dark spot corrector in the Genucelle Most Popper Package.
That's genucelle.com slash backstage right now to save over 70% off Genucell's most popular package.
All orders will include a mystery luxury gift while supplies last.
Genucelle.com slash backstage.
I hope you've enjoyed being an owner of the Daily Wire because the HR lawsuit Mathis is about to file against you.
He's going to remove all the winners.
It was short-lived, but it was worth it.
Speaking of people who don't look very good, Hunter Biden did not look very good this week when his business associate testified behind a closed door that he did in fact chat with Joe Biden about his business and that Joe Biden not only was aware of his business dealings, which he already knew, but was actually on more than 20 phone calls with these crooks that Hunter Biden was shaking down on behalf of the Biden crime family.
I'm a little doomer about the whole thing.
I'm just a little, I kind of think it doesn't matter.
Oh, yeah, Biden's corrupt.
Is that going to change?
Yes.
You think it does?
It does.
You know, first of all, the polls on these things that show that people don't care.
They can crater like that.
They disappear.
Watergate was like this.
Nobody cared about Watergate until everybody cared about Watergate.
And I think that this is the kind of thing, look, the press can cover this up and they have covered it up.
The DOJ can hide it.
They have hidden it.
The Democrats can say it doesn't exist, but it does.
And it means that when somebody runs against Joe Biden, and this is why I'm still doubtful that he's going to be the candidate, you can't keep them from pointing this out relentlessly.
If it's Trump, it'll be relentless.
If it's DeSantis, it'll be relentless.
And that's why I think the way that the election looks right now has nothing to do with the way the election is going to look in the end.
It might be a Trump-Biden contest, but there's every reason to think that Biden won't be in it.
And it's possible that even Trump won't be in it.
Wow.
You're always such an optimist.
What I love about it.
No, there is.
But yes, it makes a difference.
And the reason that it makes a difference is because Joe, Trump has nowhere to fall.
As I've said for literally at this point, seven, eight years, Donald Trump's a mud monster.
He's made of mud.
The more mud you throw on him, the more he's made of mud.
And so like you say, oh, Donald Trump is a student of the Russians.
And he's like, okay.
And he's not.
I mean, he clearly is not, but it doesn't matter.
You can throw that stuff at him.
It just doesn't have any impact.
When Joe Biden ran as I'm restoring honor to the Oval Office and cleanliness, and we're getting past the corruption.
We're getting back past the Trump and the evil corrupt time and all of this kind of stuff.
And his character is now an issue in the election.
And it wasn't really an issue in the election in 2020.
It should have been because he actually is a venal and corrupt guy and has been for literally his entire career.
He's a scumbag.
He's a bad guy.
He's been a bad guy his entire career.
But he got away with it because on the other side of the aisle was Donald Trump and everybody had already established that Donald Trump was, of course, the worst sinner who had ever sinned.
And so now there's so much mud on Hunter, on Joe's.
This, by the way, is the reason why he suddenly acknowledged his seventh grandchild, because his final defense in all of this is going to be, I just love my family too much.
They've moved the goalpost.
The goalpost went from, I've never heard of my son's businesses, to I was never on calls with my son's friends, to I'm not in business with my son.
And eventually this is going to move to, of course, I was in business with my son.
He was suffering.
He was a crack addict.
I love him too much.
And then the comeback by us was going to be, oh, really?
So if you're a member of the family, then presumably you love that person and you take care of them.
So why are you disowning the seventh grandchild?
And so he's preemptively cutting that up by saying, look, now all of a sudden, I have a seventh grandchild, and I love this seventh grandchild.
I love the seventh grandchild.
By the way, it is by far that that issue must have been pulling terribly, which is why Maureen Dowd was writing pieces about it in the New York Times, which is the only feedback channel that Joe Biden actually cares about.
Yeah, it matters, and it matters mainly in terms of turnout.
The turnout is the way that Biden loses the election.
Turnout, if the 150 people show up to 150 million people show up to vote the way they did in the last election cycle, Trump loses to Biden.
If it goes back to 130 million, 140, 135 million, Trump could easily sneak by.
And this is the kind of thing, by the way, to be fair to Maureen Dowd, she has always been really good on issues like this.
She was good with Clinton cheating.
And this is why she stands up.
The defense that was put forward by Dan Goldman here, which was that Joe was only on the phone talking about weather, is the most absurd defense I think I have ever heard.
I mean, there are people laughing at Donald Trump's classified documents defenses.
And frankly, I think deservedly in many cases because they're silly, that it was golf plans that he was waving around Bedminster and so forth.
That is not even remotely in the same ballpark in terms of just embarrassingly bad defense as the, he only was on the phone with Hunter during business meetings to talk about the weather.
As I said on the show today, like, I'll be in business meetings all the time.
And my dad will call because I'm really tight with my dad.
And you know what happens?
Either I don't pick up the phone because I'm in a business meeting and I text him, I'll call you back in a few, or I say, it might be an emergency, guys.
Excuse me for a second.
I walk out of the room and I take the phone call with my father.
Or I get on the phone.
I say, Dad, I'm sorry, I can't talk right now.
Hey, pops, everything good?
Okay, fine.
Bye.
Exactly.
I'll tell you exactly how these meetings went.
And we all know how they went.
The way these meetings went is that Hunter Biden said to the board of Burisma, I want $83,000 to help broker a deal to get rid of Victor Shokin here.
And they said, Oh, really?
What can you do for us?
And he said, Well, I am super tight with my father, the vice president of the United States, who's in charge of Ukraine policy.
In fact, we're so tight that he picks up every time I call the phone.
Watch.
And then he picks up the phone and he calls Joe and he says, Hi, Dad.
I'm here with the partners here at Burisma.
Say hello.
Oh, hi.
How's the weather over there in Kyiv?
That's great, Dad.
I hope you're doing well, and I'll talk to you soon.
Click.
End of conversation.
Because you've heard the new defense of this is: no, these corrupt Ukrainian businessmen, they didn't have access to Joe Biden.
They only had the illusion of access.
To which I say, what's the difference?
That's called access.
That's like the guy who's there to shake down the bartender.
And he calls up Al Capone.
He says, Yo, Al, how's everything going over there?
And Al Capone picks up the phone.
He's like, Well, it's going great.
How are you?
And he's like, Well, it's going great.
And they hang up the phone.
How's the way?
And he turns to the guy and he says, So it'll be $10,000.
Yeah, exactly.
Or your bar burns down.
By the way, this defense, this defense that I never spoke to my son about his business is not actually a defense.
If you went on the air one day and suddenly said, You know, abortion isn't so bad, your father would show up at the door and say, You know, Ben, I think you're making a mistake here because you're close to- Joe Biden is an enabler.
Okay, this is the other problem here: his entire case is, I love my son so much that I do everything for my son, and my son is great and all this kind of stuff.
His son is a crack addict.
The first rule of people in your family who have a drug addiction is you deny them access to money.
It's literally the first thing you do.
You do not provide them access to large sums of capital, like $83,000 a month.
Beyond that, it is beyond me how the most smoking gun of any smoking gun in this entire story is right out there in the open and everybody just pretends it doesn't exist, which is a text from Hunter Biden to his daughter Naomi in 2019 saying, At least you don't have to pay my bills the way I pay dad's bills.
He literally says that in a text message.
Do you think that he just made that up?
He literally says, I'm paying this entire family's bills and I pay Pop's bills.
But, you know, just in terms of a timeline, Obama, who, by the way, I've always said was not money corrupt.
You know, Obama was too much of a power corrupt.
He was too much of an ideologue to be money corrupt.
But Obama puts Biden in charge of Ukraine corruption.
And then Hunter Biden has a job at Burisma.
And Biden doesn't call him up and say, no, sorry, don't do that.
That's a bad thing.
And so they really are in a kind of dance of blackmail the two of them.
I think that they are in a very, very intense criminal relationship, which in which Biden, Joe Biden, may not be the power broker.
You know, Hunter Biden, in a lot of ways, can say to him, you know, you got to keep me close because if you don't, I'm going to tell the truth.
You know, I think this is a very complicated relationship, but the one thing it's not is clean.
The one thing it's not is just talking about the weather.
Right, right.
Although I do love that guy, that Goldman.
He's my favorite.
Truly, hummana, hummina, humana.
Now, let's say Biden's out of it.
Then the alternatives are.
Gavin Newsom.
Gavin Newsom for sure.
He's the Whitmer.
Budajej wants it.
He's not going to get it.
And then Kamala, did you see Kamala came out this week and attacked Ron DeSantis over the most, it was probably her best performance because she seemed almost human here.
But it was such a ridiculous accusation.
Here she is.
This is unnecessary to debate whether enslaved people benefited from slavery.
Are you kidding me?
Are we supposed to debate that?
Let us not be distracted by what they're trying to do, which is to create unnecessary debates to divide our country.
Oh, my God.
So what was the debates to divide the country?
Yeah.
So this is your governor.
He's being accused of implementing new standards in education that say that black people really actually benefited.
By the way, not being accused not just by Camilla Harris, but by other Republicans.
Yeah, that's right.
Which is the much bigger problem here.
Okay, what does the actual standard say?
What it actually says is that some slaves learned skills that they could actively use to their own benefit post-slavery while they were slaves, which is not a statement about the wonders of slavery.
It's a statement about the durability and the human heroism of slaves.
And it's one line.
One line.
In 212 page, but the line isn't even bad.
It's in the AP standards.
It's literally in the AP standards.
The AP standards say that slaves learn skills that they then put to use for their own benefit afterward.
It's exactly this.
It's an up from slavery by Booker Wash.
They did the same thing to Greg Gutfeld when he said that Jews survive by being useful.
The narrative that Greg is somehow appeasing the Holocaust, saying the Holocaust was a good thing, is such a childish narrative.
And the narrative that DeSantis is pro-slavery is so childish.
In any other context, we recognize this as a tribute to the person.
Like if there's a story, I read recently there's a story about a man in the Holocaust that learned how to sew and then later went on to become a world-famous tailor using that skill.
And usually, so if you wrote a biography of that man, not only would you mention that, but that's like one of the central facts.
In the midst of trial and tribulation, you're able to take something and then use that for success later in life.
And I think everyone, of course, understands.
By the way, we were literally told that that's the story of George Soros.
That he learned to basically survive and that those survival skills then translated into his massive wealth later on because during the Holocaust, he was actually like, you know, finding objects from killed Jews and he was selling them.
And this was a part of his kind of hero's journey.
So the whole thing is made up nonsense.
That's anti-Semitic.
Don't be an anti-Semitic.
Part of it is, obviously this is an attempt to attack DeSantis.
That's what I'm about, but it's also, when it comes to slavery in particular, we've gotten to the point now where it's just you're not allowed to say anything about it at all other than it was very bad.
White people did it.
It was bad.
And that's the end of the conversation about slavery.
And if you attempt to expand it beyond that in any amount of time.
In tribute to the slaves.
In tribute to the slaves.
Right.
Then it's super duper.
Well, also to say, it was a black historian who wrote these status.
Let me just say that.
Dr. William Allen, yeah, that's correct.
It's really a point of high irritation, but the media are so invested in the gaslighting at this point.
The other Republican candidates who went after this are so, it's so disreputable.
It's so gross to try and prop up.
And what I find amazing about this is that apparently it's okay to do it against any other Republican.
You can't do it against Trump, right?
You can't even say true things about Trump.
But if you say false things about Ron DeSantis, then everybody just kind of goes, eh, well, that's the name of the game.
That's totally okay.
You know, and I find that, I find that really difficult.
Imagine if Tim Scott came out and called and accused Trump of being essentially racist.
Oh, my God.
Everybody on the right would, he'd be killed by everybody on the right.
That's a good point.
But you could do it against DeSantis.
But part of that, look, if it's a campaign and a campaign is lobbying an attack on another campaign, all is fair and love and war and politics.
But my fear is if any Republicans are sincerely making this attack, it's so preposterous.
And it cuts at a deeper level, too, which is something that has been accepted by the left and unfortunately maybe parts of the right too, which is this idea that suffering is just always the worst thing for morally evil.
You know, many of the moments when we most grow, when we become edified and sanctified, are in our moments of suffering in all of our own lives.
Well, that doesn't make the evil good.
It doesn't alleviate the responsibility for the evil.
It doesn't mean the person who is doing the evil to you is somehow doing you a favor.
It's a ridiculous, ridiculous thing.
Wait, are you saying that slavery was a program that was meant to help black people grow?
No, hold on.
I just, did Media Matters just point out that I said that I love slavery, really pro slavery or something.
Yeah.
No, I mean, that is so disingenuous.
Now, of course, the campaigns are all going to use this and they're all going to try to attack each other.
And you make a very good point, which is that the attacks on Trump right now are not forgiven quite so easily as attacks on the other candidates, notably DeSantis, who's member two.
But isn't that just because Trump is the dominant frontrunner right now and so he's got the mojo?
It's because any attack on Trump is perceived by the right as disingenuous and an attack on their opponent.
You're right, it's because he's the frontrunner, but it's more than that.
Trump is, he is, I've come to accept this.
He is the greatest instinctual political id factor in the history of politics.
He really is.
I mean, just the guy, the guy channels id better than anyone ever.
Certainly in electoral politics.
I mean, it is a talent.
It is a skill.
It is instinctive.
It's not studied.
He just, he has a gift for being able to get right at what people are feeling.
It's an amazing thing.
And because of that sort of visceral connection that he has with people, people also feel a visceral connection to defend him in a way they don't with DeSantis.
They see DeSantis as a professional who gets things done.
And because he's a professional who gets things done, he can take a hit here and there.
But for Trump, because Trump is the part of you that wants to say the thing and Trump says the thing, that means that if he's attacked, you feel personally attacked and wounded.
And that connection is the reason why Trump is leading the field right now.
And what that means is that unless Trump stumbles, it's very difficult to see him not being the nominee.
I want to be the minority ruler.
You think he might not be the nominee.
What?
You think he might not be the nominee?
Well, I won't say that.
I won't go that far.
I can't predict the future.
And he's very far ahead.
But I will say that DeSantis has started to turn himself around.
When he came out, I was very vocal about the fact that he had blown the launch of his campaign and that he was campaigning badly.
He's no longer campaigning badly.
Trump's Teflon Defense00:10:28
He's actually starting to do some very smart stuff.
And he may be a slow burn.
Remember, at this point in the primaries, Hillary Clinton wasn't quite as far ahead of Obama as Trump is, but she was far ahead of Obama and Obama was already being counted out.
And I think, you know, DeSantis, the more you see him, the better you like him, especially in the kind of conversation he just had with Brett Baer, who went after him from the left.
Brett Baer's not a leftist, but he channeled the left-wing attacks.
And DeSantis handled them professionally and excellently.
You know, there are certain things that he does that he should stop.
The thing with Florida, I've said this before, but every time he mentions Florida, I think of band camp, you know, that one time in Florida.
You know, I think he's got to change the way he talks a little bit.
But he's really good at what he's saying, and he really knows the issues at a level that Trump simply doesn't.
Well, I mean, of course that's true.
I think that's going to have a long-term effect.
I think that the only way that changes, and I've said this out loud many times, is using the Hillary-Obama comparison for a second.
The reason that Hillary started to collapse in the polls and Obama started to gain in the polls is because there was excitement that was built up around Obama, and there was no excitement about Hillary.
There was an idea that Chews basically owed it, and Obama was the fresh new thing who was going to change the phase.
Right now, there is a feeling that Trump owes it, but he also has the excitement of the base behind him.
He does.
And DeSantis does not have that yet.
And the only way to generate that is oppositionality.
That's just the dynamic in the moment.
And so the issue that I see with the DeSantis campaign is that every week or so, they're rolling out, like yesterday, he rolled out an economic plan or something.
And they treat this as though this is some sort of political point in his favor.
Well, it reminds me more of Elizabeth Warren than anything else, right?
Like every two seconds, we're getting a new plan.
No one cares about Ron DeSantis' economic plan.
What they care about is can he punch the left directly where it counts?
Because that's the feeling about Trump, rightly or wrongly.
I think wrongly.
I think Trump punches in every direction.
And sometimes he punches the left directly in the jaw and sometimes he punches himself directly in the nuts.
I think it's like it just depends on the day.
Is that better than people who aren't punching at all?
Sure, because sometimes the left gets punched in the jaw, but it also means he punches himself in the nuts a lot.
So what I prefer is somebody who punches the left consistently.
The problem with DeSantis' campaign so far is that for a brief moment in time, right after the midterm election, there was a feeling like DeSantis was a weaponized version of Trump, who would just go right at the left and he would shed the possibility that Trump was going to lose to Biden.
And he's been hampered by effectively three factors.
Factor number one is the fact that Trump sucks all the air out of the room.
And that is a real phenomenon.
I mean, Trump sucks all the air out of the room.
And it's really four factors.
That's factor number one.
Trump's sunking all the factor number two, Biden's low poll numbers are really hurting DeSantis because his electability argument was a very solid argument in January of 2023.
And it's not nearly a solid argument when Joe Biden is running in the low 40s and is running directly even with Donald Trump.
And in national polling, DeSantis isn't blowing Biden out because the electability argument just doesn't exist by the polling data.
It doesn't.
I think that's false.
It's not the way people vote.
It's not right.
Third, his main point in terms of politics of differentiation from everybody else was COVID.
No one wants to hear the word COVID ever again for the rest of their life.
And the DeSantis campaign I know has internal polling numbers showing this.
When he mentions COVID, people turn off the TV.
Really?
Because, yeah, for the same reason that we did this after the 1920 Fluenza, right?
When that happened, everybody just said, I don't want to talk about this anymore.
It was a terrible time.
We didn't like the lockdowns.
We want to move beyond that.
We don't want to think about it.
Do you want to think about the COVID period?
Who wants to think about it?
It's negative and it's nasty and it's kind of like just, yeah.
And who wants to think about that?
So like people don't want to hear about COVID.
And when he mentions Fauci, even Fauci, who the right hates, they don't hit him enough that we want to think about COVID.
When people say Fauci, I mean, I can tell by the traffic on the site.
If we put Fauci articles on the site, nobody cares.
So that's point number three.
And point number four is that he has basically run a campaign on the basis of his record and his policies.
You can't run that campaign against Donald Trump.
Everybody tried that in 2016 and it failed.
The only way to run a campaign against Donald Trump is to generate enough excitement based on your oppositionality to the left.
And so he spent the first part of his campaign not doing any unfriendly interviews, knowing they were going to sandbag him because they were.
But the reality is the reason why DeSantis was popular was not just his COVID policies.
Brian Kemp pursued the same exact COVID policies.
The reason DeSantis became a national figure is because the media made him the enemy.
They decided that Andrew Cuomo was the greatest governor of the world and Ron DeSantis was Ron Death Santis.
And so he started punching back in the media.
False narrative.
Right.
And correct.
And that is when he started to climb and suddenly became sort of the new face, the fresh face of the Republican Party.
The only way to recapture that magic is to go into dark spaces and fight monsters.
He needs to go on George Stephanopoulos' show and he needs to wait until George Stephanopoulos asks him about book bans in Florida and then he needs to wreck him.
That's what he actually needs to do.
And he's not going to do that in the Brett Baer as much as I like that interview or with Jake Tapper or with Megan Kelly.
When I say he's turned a corner, I mean literally he's turned a corner.
He hasn't gone down the road yet.
And I think that the interview with Baer was a setup for doing exactly what you're talking about.
I hope so.
And I think you're absolutely right about this.
He has to go into the left and talk to them because that's what we want to see him do.
So that leaves the question of how does he handle Trump, though?
What is this?
What is his approach to Trump?
Now, I personally think that there was that a few weeks ago, there was the video that DeSantis camp put out attacking Trump for kowtowing to the LGBT cult.
And it was like roundly condemned by the left.
And even people in the Trump camp said that it was anti-gay.
I personally think that's when going after Trump, that's exactly what he needs to be doing.
I agree that the fact that Trump didn't fire Fauci should matter a lot.
It doesn't, though.
But painting Trump and pointing out that, okay, this guy's to the left of me.
Cultural issues.
That was the crew's strategy in 2016 was, hey, Trump is squishy on some of the LGBT issues, and I'm going to be the consistent cultural conservative.
And he did it very effectively, came in number two.
Now, you might say he only came in number two because, you know, Marco Rubio didn't drop out before Florida, and because, you know, we— But that stuff also matters now much more than it did in 2016.
That's true.
Nobody was talking.
In 2016, the conservatives have given up on all LGBT trans wasn't a discussion among most.
Now it really matters.
Now people understand that the pride flag is they understand what it is and it represents what it does.
Also, Cruz did something else, which was my good friend Donald.
And that was a big mistake.
He basically bet that Trump would eat him last.
I think that's exactly.
He's incredibly differential.
And I love Cruz.
Cruz is like politically my spirit animal, but he has a problem with women, you know, not in his personal life, but as voters.
It's pretty funny.
Yeah, no, as voters, they don't like him.
I think that the only, there's two possible strategies for DeSantis.
I can see him choosing either one.
One strategy is that he basically says, I'm not running against Trump as much as I'm outpacing him, right?
Because the problem with Trump is that, yeah, basically he goes into the, let's say he does the things we're talking about.
He goes and he punches the left and he does it effectively.
And then he says, listen, I just do this better than Trump does.
I'm doing this.
You can see they're afraid of me.
You can see what they're doing.
And you start building momentum that way.
And suddenly he becomes the DeSantis of 2020 during the pandemic as opposed to the DeSantis of 2023.
That's strategy number one.
I think it's probably the best strategy because what the data show are that attacks on Trump backfired everybody who does them in the Republican Party.
Yes.
Every single attack.
It doesn't matter what they are.
Especially policy attacks.
Any attack.
Any attack on Trump because, again, he's got that kind of id connection with the base.
Teflon, base.
With the base, for sure.
Not with the American public, which is a problem for a general.
In order to be Teflon Ron, you have to win 49 states.
In order to be Teflon Don, you have to lose an election and then lose a midterm election and then lose several special elections.
I'm only going to call you Teflon if you actually, you know, number one, don't go to jail and number two, become president again.
If he becomes president again, then he truly is Teflon.
If you go to jail, that's a mark in your favor.
The real narrative, as far as I'm concerned, the actual true narrative is that Trump was a godsend that turned the Republican Party around, that's focused it on the things that need focusing about.
He opened the road to a conservative future.
I really do believe this.
It is DeSantis who is more equipped to go down that road.
It's a hard argument to make because it's essentially saying I'm the better Trump and nobody is the better Trump.
Trump is not the only one.
He's also going to have to at some point say that Trump lost.
And this is the point.
This is a real thing.
You cannot say that you are more electable than the guy if the base thinks he won.
That's not a possible argument.
There's this other problem, which is we keep trying to evaluate Trump's candidacy as though it were some normal year.
This is the first time since 1888 that a president has run for a non-consecutive second term.
So he is running, for all intents and purposes, as the incumbent, which is why a lot of the strategies that were intended to quash him have not worked.
So then in terms of bringing the fight to the left, I had been long opposed to impeachment without a strong legal foundation of Biden, even though they impeached Trump for waking up too early.
Where are you now?
The GOP has started to indicate that they might impeach him.
Roundtable, are we pro-impeachment now?
I'm with Kevin McCarthy.
I think an impeachment inquiry is the way to go.
And so I think they need to go a little further down the road before the inquiry opens.
Because once you have the inquiry, then there has to be a conclusion.
Okay.
Right.
But no, I think we can't make the promise without giving the guarantee.
No, but I think we're there.
I think we are in terms of, well, I see your point politically.
If it added actual, right.
So if it added actual legal power, then sure.
It doesn't add actual legal power.
Declaring an impeachment inquiry doesn't add additional subpoena power.
It's not like they have additional compulsory power.
No, but I still think...
It depends on if you are willing to...
Don't pull the trigger unless you're willing to see where the bullet goes.
Yeah.
And so.
I do think this thing with this bribe, you know, like maybe I'm the last person in America who thinks it's not a good thing that the vice president should be bribed for five years.
Oh, no, no, no, I think total.
I think, listen, I think it's a very real thing, and I think it is absolutely moving in that direction.
I think we're about two steps away.
Okay.
Right.
So I'm not saying that they shouldn't do it.
I'm just saying that I think at this point it looks a little bit eager and premature.
And so they should, you know, they should actually try to subpoena the president.
I think they should actually, there are like a few things they need to do.
They should actually try to subpoena the members of the DOJ who tried to sign the Hunter Biden sweetheart plea agreement.
I think we should see the Devin Archer transcript first, which I totally agree.
Challenging Facebook's Content Policies00:07:43
See, this is another thing, right?
Like when the left says, okay, so show us the transcript.
I'm there.
Yeah.
That's fine with me.
I mean, I'm for full transparency.
Let's see what he said.
Matt, you pro-impeachment?
Oh, absolutely.
I have been from the beginning.
From day one.
There's something else I do want to get to, which we'll probably have to get more into it for the member segment.
So for the Hoy Floy out there watching on YouTube, go on over, dailywire.com.
You become a member.
Ben, you have a new show out, which is where you just do a very Ben-like thing and you just dispel all feelings whatsoever and just go down this litany of facts.
And it's got very cool graphics about it.
And it's with me in sunglasses.
It's very strong energy going on, I would say, in that picture.
So in it, you're going after something that is not often talked about.
And it's, everyone knows about ESG, or maybe you've at least heard that initialism.
The one that a lot of people don't know about is GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is another one of these just bloated, multinational, corporatist, kind of globalist, awful things.
And you went in and broke it down because we got some information that Facebook was colluding with the Biden administration to really clamp down not just on misinformation, on memes.
And Garm is like a big figure in the room here.
Here's just a little clip from the new show.
GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these megacorporations, the advertisers, together with big tech companies like Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, Google-owned YouTube, the CCP's TikTok, and even Snapchat and Pinterest.
This unholy alliance created something they call the brand safety floor and suitability framework.
Think of brand safety as a dog whistle for censorship.
They say it themselves.
The brand safety floor means, quote, content not appropriate for any advertising support.
In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace.
If you think this is only something big news corporations have to contend with, think again.
Even the content you consume from independent content creators on social media platforms, like the one on which you're watching this video, is subject to these globalist powers that be.
So for example, my friend Matt Walsh, he was demonetized on YouTube.
Why?
Well, because he says that men are not women.
The same was true on TikTok, another GARM member, where Daily Wire hosts are routinely hit with content strikes at various bans for saying things like men are not women.
Or for example, if you question the accepted wisdom on COVID.
So for example, let's say you say that vaccines, not great for kids.
No evidence kids need them.
Kids aren't dying from COVID.
If you say any of those things, GARM, WEF, WFA, they will crack down on you with alacrity.
Why aren't you wearing those glasses now?
That looks great, right?
I really like the glasses.
Yeah, no, it's a great looking series.
The production team does a really amazing job in terms of inserting the graphics that are necessary to understand really complex sets of facts.
And the thing about our first video in this video, which is out now, which is out right now over on YouTube, is that it's breaking down what is a very complex issue.
And it does require visual aids to really understand all this because this is how the left hides the ball, right?
In the same way that if you really want to understand how the money is moving with Hunter Biden and his friends, you kind of need a flowchart.
Well, that's kind of what facts is.
It's a visual flowchart that's going to explain really complex issues in ways that you can understand and encapsulate and send your friends.
So the next time somebody asks you, is censorship happening on YouTube and why, you just send them the video and that answers all the questions for them in a visually, I think, exciting way.
So this is one of these new bombshells that no one's talking about.
And I think the left is trying to hide it.
The right is just so demoralized that we think none of this matters.
But these files came out showing that Facebook was suppressing conservatives.
We all know that.
But they were suppressing conservatives because the Biden administration was saying, hey, that lab leak theory about Wuhan, yeah, you got to suppress that.
Hey, any memes, memes, joking about COVID, you got to suppress those too.
And Facebook complied.
And these are clear First Amendment violations, which is why a judge has already ruled that the Biden administration is not really allowed to reach out to any of the social media networks and tell them to take things down anymore.
They're saying that that is effectively speaking a First Amendment violation because it absolutely is.
If the federal government invades your home and tells you that you have to censor your friend, that's a First Amendment violation, even if you're the one who's technically doing the censoring of your friend.
And so that's really where we are right now.
It's an incredibly dangerous place.
I mean, you know how bad the censorship is.
When even members of the internal team at Facebook were like, I'm not sure that we should do this.
Like, I think this is a kind of, and that was actually some of the feedback.
They're like, are we going to censor memes now?
Is that like really a thing that we're going to do?
I mean, that's how strong we are.
One of the things that we don't understand, people who are in this business don't understand.
We are protected by the First Amendment in ways that ordinary people are not.
We can go out and say things or we can sort of parade the fact that we don't care if we're canceled.
Come and get us and all this stuff.
And we can sort of strut around and be brave because we are protected by the First Amendment.
A guy who's in an insurance company, normal, you know, white-collar to blue-collar job, who has to go into HR and sign a document saying men can't become, he has no protection whatsoever.
So they're already living in this censorship world.
And when you reveal these things, which are shocking to someone like me, beyond my ability to express, they're not shocked at all because they're already living in that world.
And you have to make them understand that they're going to have to fight back.
They're going to have to, the little guy is going to have to fight back.
And we're going to have to give them some kind of cover because they're going to need legal help.
They're going to need organizational help that an ordinary single guy does not have.
He's got to feed his family.
You know, he's got to keep his job.
They're in a lot more danger than we are.
And don't forget, I mean, this was the way the Biden administration pushed the vaccine mandate.
They didn't push it right away.
It wasn't, here's the vaccine, okay, you all have to take it.
They waited until enough people had voluntarily taken it that they had a significant enough chunk of the people that they didn't think the pushback would be so great once they said, okay, the rest of you have to do it.
And so you're totally right.
We all get dinged on the big tech platforms frequently, but we don't get dinged as much as ordinary people who can't make a big fuss about it.
That's right.
And so, you know, they always say the Supreme Court follows the poll numbers, the Supreme Court reads the election results.
Well, the liberal establishment broadly does that.
And so if enough ordinary people just push back, which requires more courage than for public people to do that, they're going to pay attention to that too.
And speaking of having these kind of conversations that are a little smaller, a little more private, I think we need to say goodbye to the Hoi Poloi, the Hoi Poloi, all the freeloaders on YouTube.
So we love you, freeloaders.
But we want you to come on over to dailywire.com.
Okay.
It is becoming increasingly challenging to find a platform that truly values free speech and provides unfiltered perspectives.
Daily Wire Plus is a beacon of hope, I certainly think, amidst all of the chaos.
We are not afraid to challenge the status quo.
That is why we create groundbreaking movies, shows, content that you won't find anywhere else.
Very soon, you are going to see kids' content.
I know a lot of you have been asking about it.
Takes a long time to spin up a kid's film studio.
And we've got some really, really great content coming up and so much more.
There has never been a better time to become a part of the movement.
Join Daily Wire Plus, not just today.
Join it right now so that we can take your questions and talk about all the saucy stuff that we can't talk about on YouTube over at the member block YouTube.